Thursday, June 28, 2012

I may have cast a metaphorical stone at Michelle Malkin, it just wasn't the first one thrown... She's been in the stone-casting business much longer than I have and she's mastered the curve ball.

So, I've had a little bit of fun with Twitter lately, but overall, I've been unimpressed. In the Southeastern United States - where Twitter is waaay more popular than it is anywhere else, you just have way too many knee-jerk conservatives using it as a place to rant about Barack Obama or black people in general... When filling all 140 characters of a "tweet" seems like a daunting task, Twitter is just your size. It's a "safe place" for people who have been bullied on the playgrounds of their own imaginations.

Now don't let me mis-characterize good southerners and twitter users as racist unnecessarily... They hate lots of things aside from black people. One thing that I've learned about them is that theyREALLYhate an organizationcalled PETA. Now, I've been wanting to talk about this guy who started the "We Hate PETA" movement for quite some time now, but the subject is so overwhelming that I usually just end up linking to his wikipedia page and hope that people "get it".

He's a lobbyist for every industry that relies on the mass, unregulated killing of animals (and sometimes people) without compassion. With some sort of satanic stroke of brilliance, he decided to start the "PETA Kills Animals" website... Now he didn't have any sort of foundation for this claim, initially, but that had never stopped him before... Eventually, people filled in the gaps for him and now "PETA is sorta connected to some people who may or may not partake in the occasional observance of animal death".

Now, let's introduce healthcare-hater Michelle Malkin to those of you who are not familiar with her... Those of you who don't have Twitter accounts, that is... Malkin is best known as America's least professional yet most noteworthy Twitter user and Fox News' "go to girl" for any adverse coverage of non-white people in America. She's been described as a "self-hating", "unstable", "Tea Party mouthpiece" and "liar" on more than one occasion by more than one person. (Don't disappoint me... follow those links I just gave you!)

She says horrible things about people and makes sweeping generalizations about liberals, welfare recipients and Obama supporters all the time... She's turned it into an art form.

Now, the other day, I know all 40 of my Blogger followers just clamored to read my post about how Twitter can be used for cyberbullying... In it, I mentioned Michelle Malkin but I should have gone into more detail... she actually sort of invented it and turned it into an artform with a website called "Twitchy.com"....

Twitchy.com harnesses the power of Twitter and uses as a Human Flesh Search Engine to inspire people to attack others on Twitter based on their most thoughtless and insensitive tweets. Of course, since the site is run by Michelle Malkin and her Andrew Breitbart adoptees... their most offensive tweets are missing from the front page. They will tweet something so outlandish (like the idea that liberals are praying for the fire in Colorado to consume good Christians) and then filter through all the angry responses in order to find the most ill-conceived "loss of cool" commentary and repost it for the Tea Party to gawk at and use as a "hit list". It is what I call... "Michell Malkin's Pretty Hate Machine". Here's a post where she even holds Zach Braff accountable for what other people are randomly tweeting to him and falsely accusing racism on the part of Braff who apparently sees what we all see in Clarence Thomas.

Fans of Michelle Malkin are likely to believe the following "truths" to be self-evident:

Guns should be purchased, used, sold and waved around without any regulation.

Liberals, Blacks, Gays & Democrats are all in the same category of "undesirables" who are seeking "free stuff" from them.

Now let's skip right along to the comment I left and why... After personally triggering what she hopes will be the new "monicagate" for President Obama, Malkin got distracted by a forest fire in Colorado... This forest fire is serious business and there have already been many victims... Not the least of which, Malkin will have you know, is her little Zebra-Striped Finch named "Tweety" (not-so-ironically).

"Sad News" she tweeted... Tweety died, supposedly from smoke inhalation. Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here (see what I did right there?) and say that Malkin tweeted about Tweety more for the benefit of her insurance policy than for her followers to be "sad" about.

But nevertheless, a finch named Tweety has expired and the world must know about THAT.

So the following day, when Malkin discovered that the Red Cross was posing some competition to her with their coverage of #WaldoCanyonFire, and while those who were tired of praying for her bird decided to look elsewhere on Twitter for solutions to the disaster, she decided to tweet about those "despicable" liberals again. Twitchy/Michelle said it was all about those liberals who were sending their gay prayers to the dark one for good Christians to be consumed in the very fires that claimed dear Tweety's life!

I took the bait... I tweeted back...

Oh, the faux outrage and concern for humanity that ensued! I won't re-post the death threats. But here are just a small FEW of the hundreds of tweet-backs that I received in what had instantly become the busiest night my sad little twitter account has ever seen...

Comments written in GREEN are my thoughts added while reading them...

but wait... there's more... (click to view larger)...

In almost every single case where the Twitchy.com fanatic had claimed that I was insensitive, heartless, crazy, and death-worshiping, their preceding and following tweets were hypocritical examples of exactly that. I won't repost the racist and homophobic ones... but trust me, they're filed away in case any of these folks become the next George Zimmerman...

Now, I find it necessary, before I let you go, to also tell you 3 more things... First, from the very first one, almost every reply and re-tweet that came in was at least slightly mischaracterizing what I said... some even went so far as to suggest that I was hoping Michelle Malkin's children would die...

Secondly, this was not the first time I tweeted to Michelle Malkin... I've reasonably replied to her tweets countless times in the past and never received any sort of recognition of receipt.

Lastly, I am not a bird or animal hater of any sort... I have about 8 wild birds that frequent my backyard because they know I always leave food and water out for them... They include a Mourning Dove named Lucy (for her exaggerated facial expressions like Lucille Ball), a couple of blue jays (one is named Alphie or "Alpha 1" for his similarity to Air Force One), some almost-English-speaking wild green parrots and even a couple of Cardinals...

The difference between myself and Michelle Malkin's fanbase, is that I shoot birds with a camera and they shoot them with guns... The rest, they say... "is for the birds".

Monday, June 25, 2012

I have always been a big fan of Robert Greenwald... and have floated in a couple of the same circles as Art Greenwald... So when I saw that there was a gay left-wing blogger and fellow South Floridian writing for Salon.com named Glenn Greenwald, I figured he'd be a winner for sure.

Not so much, as it turns out...

I'm sort of new to Twitter and my blog's Twitter account has only above 80 followers thus far. A few of those followers have a propensity toward showing me their breasts... They evidently don't read my tweets or they'd know they're barking up the wrong tree. I'm still learning and only recently learned about how Tweetdeck helps a person.

I had avoided establishing myself on Twitter for the longest time because the only things I knew about it were that it limits your thoughts to 140-something characters or less and that it was, fittingly, the communications medium of choice for Sarah Palin.

Now, I know you're anxious for me to get to the point, so let me just brief you about my thoughts on "bullying" in general real quick. I'm not totally sold on the idea that bullying should be or can be legislated out of existence... but I do believe that bullying in it's myriad of forms is wrong. This might strike some as a bit hypocritical coming from me but I assure you it's not. As Dorothy Parker once said, "Every morning when I wake up, I brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue." That doesn't make me a bully, it just makes me one not to mess with.

Although I'm used to shaking things up politically and can hold my own in internet flame-wars... I support an organization called NVEEE that seeks to make life a little bit better for those who aren't so thick-skinned.

Now, here's where Glenn comes in... And I'm really sort of picking on him because he picked on me first. He's not at all the only Mainstream Media personality who does this. And what he did wasn't really all THAT terrible but it was immature and it was technically a form of cyberbullying.

He and I got into a day-long heated discussion argument about Jimmy Carter drone strikes. He's steadfast against them and I'm wishy-washy on the subject. In my opinion, we elected a President who assured us that he'd "bring a scalpel" to the war on terror and "not a sledgehammer" as George W. Bush had done. I think Drone Strikes might accomplish exactly that... provided there's enough transparency regarding their use.

Well, it didn't take Glenn Greenwald very long at all to start denouncing all Obama supporters as vicious child-murdering unsympathetic warmongers and yaddita-yaddita-ya... Of course, the terrorists who use children as body armor are just trying to get some long-awaited respect as far as Glenn is concerned... but I digress...

That part, I can handle - but where it got curious is when Glenn did what I've seen Michelle Malkin do before... He kept re-tweeting his responses to me over and over again. Now, I didn't know at first why he was doing this. I thought maybe his keyboard got stuck or something... (he might actually look at the pictures of the "cam people"). And when somebody "re-tweets" themselves using an application like Tweetdeck, Twitter doesn't tell them not to. Furthermore, the re-tweeted tweet just moves up on the feed again but retains its original position on the (twitterers?) account page, so it kind of even looks like they're not doing anything.

Then his "followers" started joining the conversation one by one... Some of them were very nice and some of them were "on my side" too. But not all of them. I suddenly realized that Glenn Greenwald was "Twitter-Bullying" me... He was taking advantage of his stature by using his number of followers to launch an attack in an effort to intimidate me and make me change my opinion. His staunch defenders - dare I call some of them "sheep" - would now commence unto bleating in my general direction.

But let's not make this all about Glenn, ok? Let's imagine for a moment how this scenario would go down in a high school setting... In this alternate reality, I am the dorky fat gay kid and Glenn is the beautiful prom queen who has everything. Need I go any further with this?

As I've already stated, Glenn is not the only "blogosphere celebrity" doing this on Twitter, I've seen Keith Olbermann sort of do it too... and I've seen Cher come dangerously close. In Keith's case, he didn't re-tweet over and over again, but he made his responses to his detractors a little too personal to be comfy with. If you've been following this blog at all, you also know that I first pointed out the hypocrisy or at least the audacity of Dan Savage entering the nation's "bullying" dialogue - long before Breitbart did.

Now, I understand, that to those Twitter Superstars, they got #99Probs and a ___ aint one. Poor Meghan McCain was bullied by some of Michelle Malkin's evil minions (and other people I'm sure) and felt the wrath of Twitter... but I didn't say much at the time... because I know that Meghan's a big girl and she has lots of followers. But what if Meghan isn't the only person viewing the attacks against her? What if some random *other* heavy-set girl who supports gay rights was exposed to the attack? See, it's a problem no matter who does it or to whom...

I think it's wrong for mainstream media personalities (or even just popular people in general) to victimize their detractors (or random people) by inciting their "fans" to do their dirty work for them. What we can do to prevent this is three-fold:

1) When you see someone being "bullied" on Twitter, tell the participants to stop.
2) Unfollow the bully and start following the bullied victim.
3) Try to avoid the temptation to pick people apart personally. Stay focused on your point and not what you think of the other person when you argue.